What is your favorite story written by H.P. Lovecraft… and why? Comment below!
Personally, my favorites are The Shadow Out of Time, At the Mountains of Madness, The Call of Cthulhu, and The Night Ocean (written with R.H. Barlow).
Oh, look — an excuse to talk about The Night Ocean! I think I’ll make it a future topic for a Lovecraft eZine video chat. This story is so rich in mood and atmosphere. The protagonist realizes that there is more to the world that he knew, that there is something behind the curtain; and it is so much more satisfying that he never quite figures out what it is, than if it had been revealed.
(By the way, I have a recording of The Night Ocean on my Lovecraft audios page. Check it out.)
Anyway… comment below with your favorites!
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Nyarlathotep is my personal favourite for its prophetic and apocalyptic tone, but I also like Dunsanian works like The doom that came to Sarnath and The other gods. Among the collaborations, the best one for me is Out from the Aeons.
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Aged mind-twitch here, I meant “Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath”, not “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”.
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Shadow, too, because of the ending.
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Through the Gates of the Silver Key. Because it is epic. Has positive outcomes. Introduces Night Gaunts. Rescue by cats. I have used Randoph Carter’s ritual to enter the Gates (imagine descending a staircase) as a way to put myself to sleep since reading the story the first time 50 years or so ago. And I also like The Shadow over Innsmouth because it feels so much like such a place could easily exist, it’s a seaport story, and it just has a certain charm about it
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“At The Mountains of Madness” is mine, for many reasons including because it is science fiction and because it has shoggoths. I’ve used this as back drop to most of my Harrison Peel tales (The Impossible Object). Close seconds are “The Shadow Out of Time”, “The Whisperer in the Darkness” and “The Call of Cthulhu”.
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a very tough question but a toss up between
Charles Dexter Ward and
Shadow Over Innsmouth.
Themes of the occult, secret societies, secret cities and mutants are dear to me 😉
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For years I would have hedged between The Dunwich Horror and The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Then for a decade I would have said The Colour Out of Space. But over the last 10 years I have been more and more persuaded that At the Mountains of Madness is my favorite HPL story. The more often I reread it the more impressed I am by the layering of detail and the slow development of tension, and the sheer sense of alien-ness. The only other author who has grabbed me this way with the dawning realization of something basically wrong with human perception of what happened back in deep time is Caitlin Kiernan, who draws upon her experience as a paleontologist. Maybe this speaks to HPL’s grasp of the current state of science when he was writing.
Check out Kiernan’s short stories Cabinet 34, Drawer 10 and Valencia, and the novel Threshold to see what I mean.
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I personally like “The Thing on the Doorstep”. It is quite effective and ultimately pretty gross.
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Pickman’s model holds a special place with me. It’s one of the first audio dramas of Lovecraft’s work I listened to and still will put on just for fun.
But my absolute favorite is Shadows over Innsmouth. To me, this is one of Lovecraft’s greatest stories. Others are good, but this is great. The set up is excellent, the hero is intriguing, and the ending is awesome.
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I’m having a blast reading these comments. It’s amazing how many classic stories Lovecraft wrote.
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Probably “The Colour Out of Space” but it’s difficult to pick just one. But “Colour” has the ultimate in unknowable alien presence–it doesn’t even have a catchy name like Cthulhu or Azathoth, it’s just an indefinable but deadly “colour.”
I also like “The Whisperer in Darkness” because the final image of a limp lump of flesh that was once a face thrilled and disgusted me. And the rest of the story was good too!
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I’m a fan of Nyarlathotep, mainly because of all the alien god-like beings in the Cthulhu mythos he’s a favourite of mine with his ability to go around causing chaos and mayhem wherever he goes. A close second would be Whisperer in the Dark, mainly because that was the story that first drew me in.
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The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Why? Necromancy.
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It’s a tossup between “The Thing On The Doorstep,” “The Whisperer In Darkness,” and “The Call Of Cthulhu.”
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Rats In The Walls. Kept me awake half the night the first time I read it.
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I love the prose poem “Nyarlathotep.” Horror, SF, & elegant prose in one very compact package! And, of course, I make sure to read “The Festival” (out loud, to my long-suffering husband) every holiday season.
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I love all of Lovecraft’s prose poems. I wish he had written more of them. I think S. T. Joshi considers Clark Ashton Smith the all-time greatest writer of prose poems, but, much as I dig Smith’s prose poems, I prefer Lovecraft’s.
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Color Out of Space is one of my favs. Amazing story that creates such an alien, well alien. http://agreatbecoming.com/2012/02/23/cthulhu-thursday-top-5-best-of-myhthos-cthulhu-and-lovecraft-film-tv-games-stories-and-more-a-work-in-progress/
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“The Haunter of the Dark” ! Barely beats out ” The Shadow out of Time”
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Shadow over Innsmouth, though I have a special place in my heart for The Statement of Randolph Carter. And Call of Cthulhu, of course.
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“”The Rats in the Wall”, because of the memories… I read it out loud at the cottage one night, I’m not sure how many slept… Twenty years later the kids are grown up and married with kids of their own but they still talk about that night… From then on I was hooked…
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Shadow Over Innsmouth!!.
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I have always loved The Music of Erich Zann; Dreams in the Witch House; Whisperer in the Darkness; The Shunned House; Horror at Red Hook (Only because I live in Brooklyn).
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This is a complex question. I love the adventure of At the Mountains of Madness, the noir detective aspects of The Horror at Red Hook and Call of Cthuhlu, but my favorite would have to be The White Ship. The dream like narrative and the way the story ends in both physical and emotional tragedy always strike a chord with me.
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I think I’d have to choose three: Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (weird and dream-like), Colour Out of Space (still creeps me out to this day) and Shadow Out of Time (for best conveying the sense of vast abysses of time & space).
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I’ve always been fond of “The Outsider.”
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It’s hard to pick and chose as so many stories talk to me on different levels … MoM is just as dear to me as Rats, but for completely different reasons.
The one story that has left a permanent (haunting) impression is The Night Ocean … It may not be the most Lovecraftian of them all, but it still talks to me.
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Having only recently tapped into the world of Lovecraft, The Festival was the first story to instantly pull me in. Lovecraft is so poetically dark and so vivid in imagination. The Festival feels like after that dream where I wake up with an uneasy and eerie gut feeling that I’ve experienced something inherently evil. And, for whatever the reason, I find myself craving more.
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“The Statement of Randolph Carter.” I love the part where the creature says, “You fool, Warren is DEAD!”
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It was 1974. I was in the navy and our ship was going from Japan to the Philippines. The ship had all it’s lights off and I would sit on deck reading by the light of the moon one of the Del Rey’s anthologies that had The Shadow Out of Time, At the Mountains of Madness and Pickman’s model.
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That’s awesome, Larry.
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Probably “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.” Scary in a subtle way. I kind of liked the film version “The Haunted Palace.” scripted by Charles Beaumont, although it strayed far from the original story.
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Allow me to mention “The White Ship,” also.
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Wow, reading the story titles in these comments brings back so many wonderful memories. Lovecraft produced such a rich body of work.
It’s hard for me to pick favorites; once I get started, I think of one Lovecraft story after another. Some of my present top favorites, though, are “The Dreams in the Witch House,” “The Haunter of the Dark,”
“The Unnamable,” and that delicious little prose poem “Ex Oblivione.”
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I vacilate between Re-Animator – because it’s got zombies and zombies make everything cool. Especially when they have wax heads and talk from the boxes they carry – and The Whisperer In Darkness – because looking into the abyss really is worth your sanity – and Pickman’s Model – because good art should destroy.
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I read my first Lovecraft almost by accident while looking for more Robert E. Howard, Conan stories in 1965. It was “The Doom that Came to Sarnath” I thought it was OK. Then I happened upon “The Strange High House in the Mist” and I was irrevocably hooked. After that I found Conan stories by accident while searching for Lovecraft. I have to say that my favorite of his longer pieces is “The Dunwich Horror” though “Shadow Over Innsmouth” comes close. Do you get the impression I have a hard time choosing — you would be correct in that assumption.
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“The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” followed closely by “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”. Why? Dream-Quest is the height of Lovecraft’s “Dunsanian” work, which is my favorite stuff. It’s sheer imagination, but filtered through his dark view and it’s an odyssey into magnificent strangeness. As for “Silver Key,” it’s a cosmic mind-trip that peels back the layers of reality and reveals something unexplainable lying beyond our own universe–and you can’t get much more “Lovecraftian” than that.
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Lovecraft’s “Dunsanian” works have an incredible, unearthly beauty. It’s a shame they’re so often undervalued relative to the Cthulhu Mythos stories.
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with you all the way, John
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“The Horror at Red Hook” and “The Colour Out of Space” both, for me, reflect Lovecraft’s rather buried humility about his own outlook on life. While an avowed rationalist, Lovecraft still seems very aware of the limitations intrinsic to his worldview; this is especially evidenced in “Colour”.
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At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow Out of Time, Pickman’s Model. Mountains for epic story quality, Shadow for the mythological element, Pickman’s for classic horror storytelling.
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Mine would have to be Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, Call of Cthulhu, and most of all The Outsider.
I believe that the outsider was his greatest work. It had all his influenties in one setting. You couldn’t escape the haunting atmosphere, the strange world and the surprise ending. It conveys a dark gothic story, and then swims into horror. It’s an amazing tale.
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I love Celephais for its beautiful and evocative imagery. The protagonist, Kuranes, is that rarest of Lovecraftian characters — an individual who is, in a manner of speaking, triumphant at the conclusion of the story. I also enjoyed encountering Kuranes again in the wonderful and epic Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath.
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I was just thinking about this the other day. I’m so glad I get to gush a bit with my fellow Lovecraftians. For me, it would have to be The Whisperer in the Dark. While I feel Lovecraft’s work is timeless and a person can sit down and read it over and over without it getting boring, when I read the Whisperer in the Darkness, I read it as though it were the first time I was reading it. Every time. The hairs on my neck stand up and goosebumps arise on my arms as the tension mounts with the exchange of letters between Wilmarth and Akeley. The constant hint at the reality of this terror that has been speculated upon and the final ultimate horror that is revealed is “sunthin’ ta stir ye up an’ make yer blood tickle”, if I can quote a certain decadent old man from another Lovecraft favourite of mine, ‘The Picture in the House’.
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Pickman’s Model.
I had known about Lovecraft for years before I ever read him. I’m kind of a general geek so his name would pop up from time to time. I liked the games based on his work and I liked the conepts that he played around with so I eventually just decided to read his actual works.
The first book I read was Del Rey’s The Dream Cycle. And for whatever reason the early stories just weren’t clicking with me. It was mostly the language he used mixed with my somewhat scatter-brained nature. Then I got to Pickman. It clicked for some reason. I was finally reading Lovecraft “right” and it finally worked on me. I still remember sitting in a crowded coffee shop with genuine chills down my spine.
After that brakethrough reading Lovecraft became easier for me and I started enjoying his work the way it’s supposed to. Pickman will always hold a special place in my heart as the story that truely ushered me into his weird world.
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I always return to “The Haunter of the Dark,” which is for me E’ch-Pi-El’s Gothic masterpiece, such an effective tale. Now that I have visited Providence, the story takes on more meaning and magnificence. I shall be reading it, in its Penguin Classics publication, silently and alone, in my room at NecronomiCon. And then I shall go to Federal Hill and have an Italian dinner.
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With everything that’ll be going on, I certainly hope you get your wish 🙂
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Hey Wilum- did you get my email 😀 I like this story a lot too. Its probably third for me, after Innsmouth and Ward.
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It was, is and always will be Cats of Ulthar. I know it’s arguably not the the one that best represents Lovecraft’s work or ideas. However, it was the very first story I ever read of his and it was in an anthology. It made me seek out his other stories and then the stories of writers like Clark Ashton Smith and R.E. Howard. The story has cats and I guess it’s the way I feel too about animals and our relationship to them and how the gods would not care for their being harmed.
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My answer changes frequently. The Shadow Out Of Time has traditionally been my favorite, but right now I’m going for The Doom That Came To Sarnath. I like the concept of humanity as encroaching on territory that does not belong to them, and the inevitable futility of civilization.
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Ghouls have always held a morbid fascination with me, so it’s hard to beat “Pickman’s Model” and “The Rats in the Walls” as far as my favorites are concerned. However, I just read in The Throne of Bones “The Ghoul’s Child” which really frightened in addition to disgusted me. McNaughton was a real genius with the use of the ghouls. Threshold by Caitlin R. Kiernan is a real gem as well, and I hope for a new addition to the Deep Time books after Red Delicious comes out.
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Clicked on that Amazon link only to be re-directed to a page that immediately advertized a Cthulhu Mythos Megapack featuring a ton of different authors for only $0.99??? Yes please!
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My favourite tale by Lovecraft is The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and my second favourite is Through the Gates of the Silver Key. As an occultist (or Cultist, if you prefer) these two tales, to me, ooze magick!
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